Slashdot Mirror
David Craddock and Two Blizzard North Co-Founders (Video 2 of 2)
In this video, we continue our conversation with author David Craddock about his investigation into the early days of game studio Blizzard for his new book, Stay Awhile and Listen. He's joined by Dave Brevik and Max Schaefer, two of the co-founders of Blizzard North. They talk about keeping games accessible, the importance of getting the amount of background story right in Diablo, and whether the creators of these early games have any regrets about them. They also talk about designing The Butcher. (This is video part 2 of 2. The transcript of Part 1 is now available, too, if you care to go back and read it.)
They tried this with FarkTV. People read faster than you can talk, and not everyone has free bandwidth and necessary codecs. Stop sucking.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Craddock's story is instructive. It was not until Blizzard North received corporate backing and a practically unlimited budget that Diablo became a viable project and even then, it took somewhere between 50 and 100 man-years to ship it (while the developers basically neglected everything else in their lives)
It is also instructive in that video games have not advanced one inch since. Development is still impossibly labor-intensive, prone to all manner of bizarre technical risks and requires hundreds, if not thousands of man-years of effort backed by multiple eight-figure investors.
Those that don't burn out are fired. No technology survives two release cycles, and the result is at least half of the players bitch and cry and rage because a) the game has a price tag > 0 and b) the graphics suck. (The graphics always suck) Anyone with any sanity at all abandons the industry by age 25.
Crawford had it nailed 15 years ago. Video games are dead. They are just expensive inflatable dolls.